A Leopard's Shorts
by Sthrissa
Summary: History is usually written by men and though once she would have been outraged, now she is merely grateful. Lady Margolotta considers the Dark Empire, conquest, redemption and hope. This is something that occurred to me near the end of Unseen Academicals.


**A Leopard's Shorts**

Author: Sthrissa  
Characters: Margolotta. Vetinari.  
Summary: AU (probably). History is usually written by men and though once she would have been outraged, now she is merely grateful. Lady Margolotta considers the Dark Empire, conquest, redemption and hope. This is something that occurred to me near the end of Unseen Academicals, and just wouldn't go away.  
Spoilers: Slight spoilers for UA, maybe Fifth Elephant.

* * *

She awoke, burning with the memory of her panicked flight from an enraged army, of an escape down a secret corridor to the hidden exit – that opened to daylight and fire. She woke to the startled face of a treasure seeker, the victim of an unfortunate stumble and a bloody cut, who quickly also became the victim of her hunger.

As she relieved the corpse of the jewellery it had stolen from her ashes she briefly regretted not first interrogating him, and thus from the next person she encountered, a foolishly bold foreigner, she would learn that fifty years had passed since she last walked amongst Man, that the magnificent empire which had taken her two centuries to craft, had been razed and left in ruins. He too fell, a victim to her ire.

What followed were humiliating days slumbering buried in dirt like some common fledgling, and nights wandering ever further from the heartland of her former power, as she sought the remnants of her servants. She found nothing.

Everywhere, she discovered that her enemies ruled; of her servants there remained only the stories of them being hunted to oblivion. She discovered that the prey, the slaves who had once cowered in terrified awe at her name, though cowered from her still, now they spoke of her with venom and reviled the memory of her greatness. And after a while she became wearied enough that she even allowed those traitors to live.

There seemed little point in killing everyone, and shamefully she had discovered that the succession of corpse-filled villages left in her wake attracted attention which she no longer possessed the resources to crush. It was a humiliation she determined to one day avenge with blood beyond any she had previously wrought, but for the moment even the Igors had abandoned her banner. Thus she, an Empress who had commanded all the creatures of Darkness, the majestic Death-Incarnate, was forced to hide from torches and pitchforks.

She learned to become discrete, flittering from village to village and only sampling enough from dreaming slaves to sate her hunger. She began to pose as a travelling noblewoman-from-elsewhere; she purchased a carriage, windows painted black, and conscripted a nihilistic vagabond to drive her during the day. She journeyed into towns and slept within inns. She paid servants to cater to her will and under a new name she even dined with local nobility, a pitiful reflection of her past glamour. And everywhere still, she found her memory reviled.

When at last she stumbled upon something familiar, it was the name of a fledgling who once served in her Army of Darkness. Bela*, a fledgling no longer, had installed himself as a local Count and ruled over the prey through some primitive birth-death-rebirth paradigm. She thought it unlikely that he would welcome her presence and so she did not go near the castle.

It seemed that those of her army who remained alive, rather than attempt to avenge or resurrect her, had chosen to tear up the fringes of her empire and to play silly games with the slaves.

Eventually, fatigued from the endless travel, her soul wearied by the unrelenting examples of her disintegrated empire, she found a town beside a river for a temporary refuge where she would wait for the world to turn. She seduced, wed, and ate the ruling lord there, adopted his name and built herself a fairytale castle. She ensnared a young Igor to serve her needs and waited for the day when she could rise again, to spread her magnificent Darkness across the disc once more.

The decades passed slowly and still she found her name cursed; the time to rebuild her domain did not arrive. She learned to mimic the games of her kin and forged an understanding with the ever-encroaching dwarfs. She, who had once seen epic battles fought in her honour, became embroiled in a pattern of petty skirmishes against a pathetic race of savage animals that refused to accept the judgement of evolution. Those half-prey, half-dog creatures whom she had once considered to be pets were upgraded to the status of rivals. The generations flew by and though the truth was corrupted by a history written by men, the hostility still remained and the appropriate moment did not come.

She did not notice as her meaningless days of patient exile grew to become increasingly tolerable, as she was slowly lost to the security of a ritual existence - the occasional traveller to relieve her boredom, the vagabonds, the homeless and unmissed to relieve her hunger, and every couple of years, a few bites of a well-muscled youth from the town for the sake of appearance. Even the endless tug-of-war with the packs of filthy mutts became less of an insult to her glory.

And when at last she met with her kin, the greatest of whom she had once commanded with another name, she was not recognised or offered the respect that she was due. She found herself too resigned to be outraged.

Resigned to the mundane existence in a cage of her own making. Resigned to a tolerable banality interrupted only by meaningless victories against her pitiful neighbours. To ever-fading dreams of past glories. To a sterile eternity.

And then He had come.

When she first saw him, the youthful, lean figure undertaking that walking buffet called the Grand Sneer, she believed him to be just another toy; a thing to be used as a welcome distraction for a few weeks, then discarded. Until he showed her how incredibly wrong she was. Until she learned to hunger for something other than blood.

She had thought him to be a puzzle she could unlock, a youth she would eventually bend to her will. She had thought she could teach him, that she would him send back to his far away city as a man forever imprinted with her influence. She discovered in that confrontation of wills that she was the one who was taught, who found herself forever changed.

He had been an individual most frustratingly unobliging to her wishes, against whom she constantly found each of her victories transformed to ash. She tried to awe him with her elaborate castle, only to find its secret corridors turned against her. She tried to impress him with her knowledge of her neighbours' affairs, to earn only his ridicule at her superficial insight.

When she showed him her control over the minds of frightened slaves and demonstrated the ways she manipulated their superstition, she later realised that instead he had taught her to see them as people. She tried to teach him hedonist pleasure and found herself learning restraint. She spoke of futility and the petty unchanging nature of humanity's existence and learned from him hope.

She became addicted. To see the cold gears of that mind turn was terrifying, exhilarating. She craved to possess, to suck from that sublime intellect an elixir more delicious than the richest blood, to emulate that unmerciful labyrinth which even decades later she could not fathomable.

She still does not know whether it was the boy who had created that mind, to satisfy some infinite void; or whether he was some personification that had simply cloaked itself in flesh and perhaps there never was a boy. She imagines frost searing from an infant's gaze and experiences pity for the deceased mother. Whatever the case, by the time she first met him it was an ancient gaze that studied her from the face of an impossibly young man and spoke to her of worth; who taught her about becoming.

By the time he had left to claim his city, she had learned true patience rather than the meaningless resignation in which she had trapped herself. She started to construct the foundations of her new rule - this time wielding whispers and ideas, extending her domain with smoke and mirrors rather than a manufactured army. And decades later, when a Terrier stepped onto her lands, she finally had sufficient resources to proceed. By her own endeavour she had made the disc turn, and the world was ready for her to rise once more.

And this time she would build an empire that was greater than merely the sum of the lands she conquered.

When she next spoke to him, over the towers that extended his reach from Circle Sea to Genua, from the Hub to Klatchian desert, she would read warm, glowing praise printed on that paper. And for a time she counted a victory.

Then, from Loko, deep within what was once a pathetic empire, there came the whispers of an ancient evil. Rediscovered, the manufactured servants of a regime whose collapse, she now realised, had been inevitable. A mistake to be corrected. But she had been well taught to shun wastefulness, and so, at the behest of a hand that stretched across a continent, she would command a child to become.

It has been so many centuries since her true name had been uttered; long forgotten even to those people in the heartland of her former empire, where the oldest stories still circulated and superstition and fear still ruled. There lived no-one who could have informed him, not the werewolves, nor the dwarfs, nor trolls, nor humans knew the truth. And those vampires who would recognise her were either scattered dust or had wisely chosen to be oblivious. The Igors knew but in this, as in all such secrets, she was assured of their fidelity. She was almost certain he could not have learned…

When she next saw him he spoke only of being her resolute ally. His support appeared unshakeable, as he offered promises to, in very own his words, "help [her] in any way [he] can, of course". And although she had not changed her shorts so much as had allowed them to rot to threads, she could see that his naïve conviction that people could be redeemed, remained powerfully resilient. He remained passionate as ever in his rose-tinted hope; he seemed as ever willing to bestow forgiveness.

And yet, with every impersonal and condescending "Madam" he uttered, she learns that he will not allow her to forget.

"Is it they who should be sorry?" asks a child.

Her victory tastes of ash.

FIN.

* Bela de Magpyr, uncle to the Count de Magpyr who would attempt to take over Lancre centuries later.

* * *

[A/N: Admittedly I am rather biased against Margolotta which may have coloured my reading of Nutt's comment, (and in reading the degree of amusement and almost contempt directed towards her by Vetinari). I usually more-or-less envision an asexual Patrician, too committed to Morporkia to emotionally attach to any one individual, and who has numerous, politically less-troublesome options, within the confines of his city, to choose from if he so desired (cough*Drumknott*cough - or Vimes -).  
I simply cannot see a Vetinari/Margolotta relationship extending beyond a childhood fling, particularly given the fact they head separate and potentially rival states. Furthermore, while it is implied Margolotta has simply transferred her bloodlust into control-lust, in UA particularly, it struck me just how much of an optimist Vetinari had to be – to have such a bleak view of people, and yet endeavour so determinedly in defiance of the universe. Margolotta's rather self-serving motives seem incompatible with Vetinari.]


End file.
